Thoughts on TV and movie period dramas

Daniel Deronda (2002)

After watching the Andrew Davies version of Middlemarch, I was keen to see his other major George Eliot adaptation, Daniel Deronda. Unfortunately, as with so many of the other films I keep writing about, it isn’t available on DVD in region 2 –though it used to be, and I’m using the sleeve of the deleted DVD as an illustration since I prefer it to the region 1 sleeve. So, once again, I had to buy on import.

Watching this not so long after Middlemarch, it struck me just how many similarities there are between the two dramas, and, of course, also between the two source novels. Both have a heroine and a hero who are not romantically destined for one another, but who become friends and whose stories sometimes counterpoint one another. Both also show the central characters constantly hemmed in and pressured by other people’s expectations.

In Daniel Deronda, Daniel and Gwendolen meet in the series’ opening scene, at the casino in Monte Carlo, and, looking at this beautiful young couple, you might well think they are going to end up together – but, in fact, their stories are about to fork off in very different directions, only occasionally intertwining.

This opening scene, which is a striking piece of filming, immediately establishes the two characters – Gwendolen’s recklessness, the way she is prepared to gamble and lose, and, by contrast, Daniel’s cautious nature and his yearning to watch over other people and prevent them from running into danger. He steps in to help Gwendolen, although she is a stranger, first at the casino and then by buying back her bracelet from the jeweller after she is driven to pawn it. He also rescues the other heroine, Jewish singer Mirah (Jodhi May) the first time he meets her – in her case, by plucking her from the river where she is trying to drown herself. And he supports both women all through the drama.

Jodhi May as Mirah

I think both Romola Garai (I’ve read that the actress was actually called after the heroine of George Eliot’s novel Romola) and Hugh Dancy are well cast in the lead roles. Garai gives Gwendolen the right blend of arrogance and vulnerability, while Dancy, as Deronda, continually holds back, watching others with a wistful expression but not stepping in and demanding anything for himself. However, my favourite performance might be May as Mirah – she just seems to play the part with such conviction. I’m looking forward to seeing her with Garai again in the BBC’s new version of Emma.

Although best-known as an Andrew Davies adaptation, this film also had a famous director, Tom Hooper, who went on to make award-winning US costume drama John Adams (another one I want to see!) as well as the recent UK movie The Damned United.

Daniel Deronda is an unusual novel in many ways, one of which is that it really takes a “bad girl” as heroine. Gwendolen deliberately trades on her beauty and marries for money rather than love, something which would be enough to damn her in the eyes of many. But Eliot makes all this only too understandable, showing how she is driven to accept Grandcourt in order to support her family, and how few options are actually open to her. She doesn’t have the talent to make it as a singer, or the patience to work as a governess.

Romola Garai and Hugh Bonneville as Gwendolen and Grandcourt

I think the series dramatises her relationship with Grandcourt, played by Hugh Bonneville, brilliantly – Bonneville never hams it up, and doesn’t even raise his voice most of the time, but his cruelty to his wife and his determination to dominate her come across clearly, shown obliquely through scenes like his brutal teasing of his (female) pet dogs. The first time I saw this series, I remember mainly being focused on Daniel’s story. This time round, for some reason, I focused more on Gwendolen and how she has to keep on smiling sweetly as her life turns into a nightmare.

However, even though I spent more time thinking about Gwen, I was still moved by Dancy’s performance as Deronda, as he delves into his family history and discovers his Jewish heritage, through a series of coincidences which at times almost seem like a dream. The scenes of him wandering through the streets of the Jewish quarter, and finding it awakens distant memories, are possibly the most visually striking sections of the whole film.

Hugh Dancy as Deronda

I thought the importance of Daniel’s mystical Jewish friend Mordecai (Daniel Evans), brother of Mirah, is downplayed in the series compared to the book, but the scene where Daniel meets his long-lost birth mother, Contessa Maria Alcharisi (Barbara Hershey) was given its full weight, and really ties in with Gwen’s dilemma, in once again showing how few options there were for women at this time. The famous singer can only achieve her full potential in her career by giving up her child.

I know I haven’t really done this great mini-series justice, but will leave it at that, just adding that the fine cast also includes Edward Fox, giving a beautifully repressed performance as Daniel’s guardian Sir Hugo Mallinger, and Jamie Bamber as Daniel’s friend Hans Meyrick.

I’ll also add that there was an earlier BBC dramatisation of Daniel Deronda, made in 1970, with Robert Hardy as Grandcourt – I’d love to compare this one, as I was so impressed by Hardy’s performance in Middlemarch, but I don’t suppose there is much chance of it ever being repeated or released on DVD.

12 Responses

Thanks for your review Judy! I adore this series – it’s one of the best ones I think! I agree that Jodhi May did a wonderful job as Mirah. It was nice seeing her play sweet and vulnerable versus some of her more recent roles. I felt Hugh Dancy was genuine and noble. Romola was stunning. She made me cheer, resent, and pity Gwendolyn. The whole storyline drew me in and it took some unexpected turns since I hadn’t read the novel.

Oh, did I forget to mention Hugh Bonneville?? Let me just say that he’s become one of my very favourite actors! Total scoundrel in this but he does it brilliantly!

Thanks, Charley, glad to hear you like this series too! I agree all the actors give wonderful performances in this – I also loved Jodhi May in ‘Aristocrats’. I have read the novel but a few years ago now.

Have you seen The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard? I almost felt that Jodhi in that series was a totally different actress than her roles in Deronda and Aristocrats. It was fascinating to watch. I liked her in the earlier scenes of Aristocrats but as it progressed, she became annoying in that she seemed intent on ruining her life.

I hope you don’t mind if I tell the people on Trollope-l about this blog. Several seemed interested in this film, and someone on Livejournal now on Trollope-l too. Ian M, who likes Davies’s films.

As you know I wrote about it there, but your blog gives me a chance to say something more general — as I wrote about it as I was watching it. I thought the strongest performance was Hugh Bonneville, really a stunning act, and David Bamber as Lush nearly retrieved his reputation with me (I really disliked the craven caricature he and Davies made of Mr Collins). I agree Dancy is appealing (but then he is always appealing as he was in Jane Austen Book Club) and Garai manages to make an unkind selfish woman (=”bad”) into an empathetic character. But they are so normal, so conventional so to speak. Not given enough space or room, I suggest Jodhi May’s Mirah (like Bonneville and the woman who played Deronda’s mother, not there for long enough though) was really more memorable. She was a stunning Sarah in Aristocrats, turning that part into an implicit Clarissa type (driven into affairs! and then self-hatred, and finally tranquillity when she threw off false ambition).

What I want to say is how _Davies_ adds something, enriches and interprets. The film is not just a resay of Eliot and we need to say what’s the difference that matters. For me it’s that Davies brings home how strange Eliot’s book really is. I did say that on Trollope-l, but maybe didn’t bring it out very well. When we read the book, we are so distracted or absorbed by its intellectual content and currents, by our narrator’s talk, and the various themes of nationalism, music too, we don’t really grasp the barebones of this bizarre story. It is bizarre if you look at most 19th century plots and if you connect it up.

So the powerful Bonneville and May come out in this film adaptation as sort of salient presences. Alas Mordecai is not central and I agree that’s a loss. Davies lost his nerve before a mass audience: he didn’t want to mess with religion and nationalism, but it’s part of what makes Eliot’s book slightly nuts — for what did she know of Israel and identities of this type.

The music master was very good; Amanda Root as the mother had a thankless part of self-sacrificing worry-wart.
But that was right in context. Better be May than anyone in the film, which is strange.

Good thing Grandcourt was drowned and it was his overweening arrogance to go out.

Hardy played General Tilney in 1986 and it didn’t come off, but perhaps in the earlier film he was able to project ruthless hardness. He has a few split second moments like this in the 95 S&S when he contemplates Willoughby to Brandon.

Dear Ellen, it’s fine that you told the people at Trollope-l.:) I do agree with you that May is the most memorable character in the film – there is something absolutely compelling about her performance.

Thank you very much for sharing your further thoughts. I’m sure I will watch this again and will bear your comments in mind then.

I also agree that the film brings home the strangeness of the book – this is something I sometimes feel with Hardy adaptations, that you watch and realise just how weird the bare bones, as you say, of the plot are, what a long way it all is from realism.

Wow- great review! I put you on my blogroll. “Daniel Deronda” is one of my FAVES in period dramas (and I’ve seen a LOT). When I 1st saw it, I wanted a friend like Daniel. He’s such an exemplary, caring, sweet young man.

“The Jane Austen Book Club” was OK. I saw “Confessions of a Shopaholic” recently, and felt bad for Hugh. I think he can do better roles.

Daniel Deronda (the book) in terms of 19th Century novels did have a very non-normative plotting and writing style. Most literary critics and scholars of Eliot and the period tend to agree tthat with this book Eliot is moving out of 19th century realism and into a proto-modernism. The book was published in 1876 which, some would argue, was the start of the modernist movement in arts, literature and culture. Modernism, as an artistic movement, was certainly underway by 1890.
One of the most talked about illustrations of Eliot’s move towards modernism is the part, early on in the novel, when Gwendolen and Grandcourt first converse at one of the Archery meetings. Eliot gives us an insight into their inner conversations with themselves and shows us what they are thinking before they translate that into spoken dialogue with each other. Many see this as an early version of the stream-of-consciousness narrative or monologue that James Joyce and Virgina Woolf were to bring to full fruition thirty years or so later with ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Mrs Dalloway’.
Another early modernist device – and this is what makes George Eliot quite ahead of her time as she was doing it right through her novels – is the way she portrays subjectivity, personality and selfhood as changing, unfixed, fragmented, liable to disruption, as constructed from popular tropes of identity, and thus without inner essence. This was most unusual for 19th century fiction; think about the characterizations (or, some would argue, caricatures) of Dickens or Gaskell.
Just a thought, great blog!
I’ll be back!

The comment shows a mature response to movies and books too. I think Gaskell uses stereotypes sometimes — she builds out of them or has them as minor characters, but that she’s not prone to the kind of satire that produces caricatures. I agree Elliot does not fall into ordinary or conventional stereotypes, but she does develop a repertoire of types of her own, which repertoire reflects her inner needs and blindnesses and experience in her life.